by Gayle Rivers
"What makes you think there's anybody at the bottom of that hill to hit?" I asked Jackson.
He looked at me, startled. We all grabbed our glasses and ran to a vantage point. Ta shu tang was exactly as it had been reconstructed on our model; the same low houses, the wooden conference hall, the low hill in front that was to be our firing line, the railway and the road leading to the hall. Something was not quite right, but I could not put my finger on it. Then it struck me. Ta shu tang did not look like a place about to receive some of the most powerful figures in Southeast Asia. Or did it? There were two vehicles parked in front of the hall, one black sedan and an army lorry. There were a few people milling about, but from this distance I could not determine if they were in uniform. There were certainly no pickets or military installations along the railway line. Was nothing happening at Ta shu tang? Were the people I saw organizing a conference that would cast the fate of half the world's population? Or were they peasants? Or local officials carrying out a normal day's routine? Maybe administration and security services were to arrive late today or tonight to keep the venue secret until the last minute. Or maybe it was all a brilliant exercise in hypothesis.
"What's happening down there?"
"Beats me."
"Does it look to you like that place is ready for an international conference?"
"Well, does it to you?"
"Man, I don't know."
"The briefings . .." Jackson started.
"Who briefed you on anything?" I asked.
No one replied.
"What was their authority? On whose orders are we about to hit the top communist commands in Asia? Do you know any names? Who can say we'll stop a war if we go down there tomorrow? And I want to go as much as you do. Maybe we would start one. Maybe somebody in the U.S. hierarchy wants war with China. He sent us to guarantee it. Now he's been found out."
"Maybe that's an empty village down there," said Jackson.
Prather came toward me, but I waved him away and walked back out to the edge of the camp. I scanned the valley below for any positive sign that it was all going to happen. Behind me, I heard the other five raving on, angry, confused. I was being attacked on all sides; by my thoughts, by what I was hearing, by what I wanted to do, by my natural reluctance to draw a conclusion too quickly, by the urgency of our situation, by the need to take positive action to restore order. I was leading men who were used to making decisions for themselves, and all of us were hovering on the brink of hysteria. I was almost out of my depth.
The scene degenerated into chaos; the five of them teetered between despair and rage. Every few minutes one or the other would rush out beside me and shout madly down the hill. I needed desperately to bring the unit back under control.
I just did not give a damn. I did not believe we would ever get out of China. We were less than ten miles from the border, but it might as well have been the middle of Peking. I had marched so many miles, fought so hard to experience the greatest moment of my life, and I was not going to be allowed to enjoy it.
I searched for a reason to justify the abort. Communist intelligence in Saigon had learned about the
mission. We had killed too many people on the way up; our kill pattern had been spotted and our route projected. Beyond that my theories got a little crazy. Some dove in the U. S. Government had set the mission up, then exposed it at the last moment to embarrass the Americans. It was a hawk out to force the ultimate confrontation with China. It was some unknown general's scheme for provoking war, and he had been caught out, or gotten cold feet. Westmoreland, how much did he know? We might be nothing more than an experiment to see how far north an insurgency team could penetrate. We might be nothing more than guinea pigs in a jungle laboratory, or we might be the trigger to plunge half the world into war.
My thoughts kept turning back to Toliver's dying moments. There was too much soldier in the man to expose secret orders. But surely he cared more for us— and for himself—than to lead us blindly on a pointless suicide mission. He must have been lied to, promised an abort prior to China. We could have turned back, mission complete, with a reasonable chance of survival. Too late he realized he was among the deceived. The experiment would be played out to its inevitable conclusion.
Fuck it, I decided. We were on our own now. From the moment the abort signal went out, we became free agents. When our people abandoned us, they forfeited responsibility for our future actions. It was my interpretation of the consequences that would determine if the hit was on. Somebody crazy sent us up here. But they never reckoned on our thinking for ourselves. If Giap was at the bottom of that hill, I had the destiny of half the world in my hands. It was almost too much for me to contemplate. I pulled myself up short. I was the decision-maker now, not Saigon, not Washington. I had to take a rational look at the whole thing.
But where to start dealing with this mad predicament? It occurred to me that whoever had sent the signal might expect us to go ahead with the hit anyway,
sweep down out of the hills and kill ourselves and everyone at the meeting in one conclusive shoot-out ... or kill a few peasants and then be hunted down like animals. We would have achieved the desired results, and wet could be totally disowned with the same breath. Were we some mad scheme Lyndon Johnson had cooked up as he walked out of the White House to get even for having lost the war? Were we manifestations of Nixon's inferiority complex, a crazy plot to drag the entire world into nuclear war? Was this the only way America's beaten and humiliated generals in Saigon thought they could ever defeat Giap and regain a little self-respect? For the first time, I realized with a start that the Chinese we were to hit were even more important than Giap. What would be the reaction of the American Government if some Chinese assassinated half the Cabinet?
The permutations were too many for me to puzzle out sitting on a hill in China. I had to make my own judgments. I had to deal with the problem within the bounds of our military environment, not get carried away with analysis of why we were there and who had sent us and why in hell the war was going on in the first place.
I tried to sort out the problem rationally, but Giap's picture kept floating into my mind's eye. I had so wanted to kill that man. In the end, it was an easy decision to make. We were the most important people in the arena now. If somebody wanted reaction out of China, they could do it some other way. They could send the B-52s. I walked back to the others. They stopped talking.
"We're going back, fellows," I said. "Let's talk it over."
I made it clear at once that carrying out the hit was beyond discussion. Anything they said to change my mind would be listened to and then dismissed. I said it was the hell with everybody else, we were the ones who mattered. There were a hundred reasons for the
mission, and a hundred more for the abort. I told them how I saw it, then just sat back and listened.
Prather was making a hard adjustment. He could not believe what was happening. He did not accept that his government would do this to him. They must have been in the dark from the beginning. With this I concurred; Prather had probably been requisitioned through military channels and stuck in here to embarrass the British. But he did not want to believe it was a setup; the Americans dared not deceive the British to that extent. He was determined to find a valid reason for the abort.
Tan's reaction was just the opposite. He saw it as total betrayal. He had been promised the one thing that every Korean in Vietnam would die for. And he had been deceived. Maybe mission control had been infiltrated by the communists. We had been flashed a false abort. He insisted we go through with the hit. He did not sound as if he believed his own argument. He was looking for an excuse to carry on.
But we were not going to carry on. These men had seen me in action for a month. They knew that if anyone disobeyed my order and struck out on his own, I would shoot him. I was completely detached about this. Our course of action had not been determined with my survival in mind. It was how I saw our best chance of maintaining a sane interpreta
tion of the circumstances. Of getting some of these men back home. We needed everybody and everything we could carry. No one man's self-indulgence was going to jeopardize the group's chances. They all recognized my determination; there was no move to go against me. But these guys deserved a hearing, and I was prepared to give them all they wanted.
It was difficult for any of us to speak coherently. We were so bitter, and we did not know who to blame. First it was the generals, then the politicians; they had been playing war games. The CIA was part of the package. Nixon got his share of the blame. The name-
less civilians with their raincoats and photographs. The colonel who had trained us.
Tan pleaded to go on. The others were utterly confused. Morrosco and Wiley did not give a damn about any broad philosophical interpretation; they just had a strong feeling of betrayal. To my surprise, Jackson was the most coherent of all; after his first explosion, he agreed with me that turning back was the best course of action.
"But tell me, Kiwi," Jackson said, "what are we going back to?"
"What do you mean?"
"What makes you think anybody wants us back? Who are we up against? What'll our reception be if we do turn up at Bien Hoa? You think the colonel's gonna slap us on the back? I'd just like to know who the hell is playing what kind of war games with the U.S. Army. And where it stops."
"Are you talking about attitude? Or about somebody shooting us?"
"I'm talking about everything."
I had expected Jackson to agree with me about the hit. He was a soldier from the word go, and sooner or later I knew he would see the abort signal as an order to be obeyed. But the by-product of accepting that order was a shattering disillusionment in the authorities he had so long respected. He knew what was wrong with the Army. He knew the bad side of politicians meddling with the military. But he had always taken the bad with the good. Now he was having doubts about how much good was there.
This was a painful process for Jackson, because he was not an abstract thinker. He had a flexible and imaginative intellect within the confines of the battlefield, but outside it he left the thinking to others. He was a senior NCO in the Green Berets. The Green Berets did a lot more flag-waving than some of the rest of us special forces. Jackson had always been ready to strike at anything that threatened America,
but he was content to let his commanding officers tell him what that threat might be. Now he was confronted with the stark realization that everything was not so cut and dried, that all the yeas and nays were not so absolute, that morality was a dilute solution. Someone had been experimenting with Jackson's life. Did it end here, and now we could try to make our way back home? Or did the expected thing—that we would turn around and come back out—lead us into something else?
Jackson and Prather argued over the question of an experiment. Prather had such great faith in his government. The British simply would not do such a thing.
"For Christ's sake, Lew," I said, "they probably don't know you're here. It's the Americans who've sent us in here. And they'll experiment with human beings like nobody's business."
Wiley and Morrosco stayed on the boil, jumping from one side to the other in every argument. They had been under greater strain than the rest of us for the past few days. The strain was showing through now. They wanted to stay. They wanted to go. They wanted to hit their targets, but this gradually turned to the fact that they just wanted to kill somebody. They needed a visible target to vent their wrath for the dilemma we were in. I was sympathetic; I was feeling again my disappointment at not being able to hit Giap. For a moment I wanted to push off alone. Do my job. End it there.
Because, boy, I had come a long way to do that job. I had a vision of that vast chunk of geography that lay between us and safety. We had spent a month getting somewhere, and now someone said come home. It was like going around the world on your feet. Simply impossible. I felt a sudden deflation in my morale, as if all my strength #nd sense of purpose had been stamped underfoot. Weakening now would be unpardonable. It was time to bring discussion to a close and get us out of there. I ordered Morrosco to bring me the mapping case.
"This has been going on long enough," I said. "Let's talk about priorities. They know we're here."
That killed the discussion instantly. And all of a sudden I was hit by the whole stupid reality of being in China, the idrocy of ever thinking that we could have gotten away with it. We were inside China and no one knew we were there until the abort? It was impossible. That brought the realization that we were up against every conceivable opposition.
"Either we get out of this as a unit," I said, "or we don't get out of anything. We have a lot of enemies now. A lot of people who don't want us to get away with what we've done. Whether they're people who are going to come looking for us here or people that sent us here doesn't make any difference anymore. We've got a common enemy, and we beat it together. Or it beats us."
We became a fighting unit again. We sat down and discussed, in a very strange atmosphere, what we were going to do. None of us expected to get out of China; we expected to find half the Chinese Army waiting for us at the river. We had to plan, but we found it almost impossible to look more than two or three days ahead. Because we all thought we would be dead.
In the short time since abort, the physical and moral decay that had set in to the unit was tremendous. We had been hurt before, but we had a purpose to drive us on, a goal that kept the adrenaline flowing. When thirty past the hour came without a signal, we had been as jumpy and anxious as a band of robbers about to hit a bank. Now we had lost all motivation for fighting fatigue. Suddenly we were exhausted. Deep blue rings seemed to pop out around the men's eyes. I felt my body sagging within me. My spirits were on the ground. Somehow I had found the strength to endure a month of combat; now it was an effort to lift my head. For the first time, I felt wounded. Every part of my body was sore and bruised, crying out for rest. When I started to stand, I knocked over a rifle
and did not bother to pick it up. I saw the Sahka on the ground nearby. I kicked it, then picked it up and threw it as far as I could into the undergrowth. For a month, I had lived for that weapon. I had looked after it crossing rivers. I had even thought about it in combat. Now I disowned it completely. It was growing dark, and I was cold. I looked at the men. They were dying. If we did not pull together quickly, we were finished.
I forced them into a briefing on the route back. Since our cover was blown, it was no good wasting time trying to hide. We would take every short cut. Our goal was M Ngoi, the Laotian village where we had rested and rearmed on the journey in. There we would make contact with the Green Berets and rely on them to get us picked up or get us out some other way. By moving straight down the valleys, we could reach M Ngoi in less than a week. We hit the maps before it was too dark to see and worked out our areas of greatest risk and probable opposition. We were running out of food and ammunition. Our medical supplies were almost exhausted. We had no time to avoid obstruction; we would cut our way through them. Gather weapons and ammunition, food and supplies where we could. We had to be totally self-sufficient. All the men were thinking it, so I said it for them.
"If anybody is hit, he has to make the pace. We can't stop. If you can't make the pace . . . well, it's up to you to handle it however you want."
The men were beginning to react. Their movements quickened. In the last hour we had been through rage, then apathy, and now we were beginning to feel rejuvenated. Tan started tearing off his bandages; he wanted to move out feeling a hundred per cent fit. I had to order him to allow Morrosco to bind him up again.
"What about civilians?" Wiley asked.
"No compassion," said Tan. "We don't have time. We can't afford the risk."
"If we need anything from a village, we take it," I said.
The unit was whole, more or less healthy, and ready
almost anxious—to fight its way home. The only man
who troubled me was Wiley. I knew him as a very open ch
aracter, always ready with his opinion even if it was tactless or badly timed. Since Toliver's death, he had grown quiet, morose. He had hardly participated in the discussion over the past hour apart from parroting Morrosco's remarks. Wiley needed guidance. I had grown to expect very human reactions from Wiley. The day after he had strangled the man on the hillside, I had caught him staring at his trembling hands. If Wiley was trembling now, it was inside, where I could not see it. He must have been going through hell. Questioning whether he could pull off his survival. And whether he wanted to. I would watch him closely.
"They're heavy, Alvin," I said to Jackson as he pondered over his rockets. "Don't take them if you don't want."
"I made them, Kiwi. I want to use them." He broke them down and strapped them back on the rocket packs. We distributed everything across the group: weapons, food, ammunition, medical supplies, canteens, incidentals. We had little ammunition left for the carbines; we had to lay our hands on communist weapons soon. We divided out a few ears of corn and some bean shoots and the last of the K rations. I put on my new uniform. Wiley took my old shirt; his was little more than a rag. The others took the time to sew rents in their garments. We all cleaned our weapons again. This was the first day of a new mission. We would start it as fresh as possible.
I saw Jackson ladling out Benzedrine to Tan and Wiley. Jackson's hand was already shaking. He must have taken some earlier to psyche himself up for the hit.
The gear we left behind was casually shoved under a rock. We no longer gave a damn about discretion. I left the Sahka where it had fallen.
I sharpened my machete, worked the action on my shotgun. The others were communicating with their weapons as well. They were all we could rely on now.